It's the manangement, stupid

Check out this book summary from Charles J. Hanley of AP news (h/t Crooks and Liars).

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country - a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press.[..]

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly.

Of course, you realize that this means the continuing deployments (including "the surge") and injuries and deaths of American soldiers in Iraq are largely linked to the bureaucratic incompetence (itself abetted by their political ideology) of The Regime in the aftermath of the war. "Heck of a job, __[your Bush-nickname here]__."

After Allawi describes the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities ("More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society."), he also concludes, "It might have been otherwise."

The same people are managing our Department of Justice for us, did you notice? And the EPA, FDA, Department of Education, Homeland Security, Defense Department, Amtrak-- need I go on? God save us (though I reckon that God is letting us reap what we have sown).